


This Has Happened Before

by Kamaete



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Bad Pick-Up Lines, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Serum Steve Rogers, Temporary Amnesia, Temporary Drug Induced Amnesia, deserumed Steve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 06:59:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5196584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kamaete/pseuds/Kamaete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony wakes up in the hospital and his first order of business is to flirt with his cute nurse. Steve isn't a nurse, but he's not quite Captain America right now either. Regardless, he is there when Tony wakes up.</p>
<p>(Tony has temporary amnesia while in the hospital, Steve is de-serumed presumably in the same event that injured Tony.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Has Happened Before

**Author's Note:**

> Not really beta'd or edited that much, sorry. Also, everytime I write the word 'babe' I'm cringing.

He wakes to a sharp-pitched beeping noise and squints his eyes open. He’s assaulted by bright white and the smell of disinfectant. This is very familiar to him, but he can’t quite remember why. The light feels like it should pierce through his head, but it doesn’t. He shifts his body and feels a distant, cotton-numbness stretch across his shoulders and his side. 

“Tony!” A voice calls, and then: “You’re awake!”

Tony moves his head and sees a lithe blond kid by his side. Bedside. He’s in a hospital room? A private one, by the look of it. And this kid– no, he looks more mature than a teenager, but still young. Anyways, he was waiting at Tony’s side? A nurse?

“Yeeeeaaahhh,” Tony draws out, looking the guy up and down. 

Tony’s first thought, well the second one after the kid thought, is that this guy is a nurse. But he’s not wearing scrubs, not even plain ones. He’s got on an oversized, worn, but well taken care of leather jacket and a baggy white t-shirt. Definitely not a nurse, unless he decided to stay by Tony’s bedside after his shift? 

“But why would you stay after your shift for little ol’ me?” Tony says out loud and the guy’s eyebrows raise.

“Why wouldn’t I? Of course I’d be here, Tony, I wouldn’t let you wake up alone, even like this,” he says gesturing at himself. He sounds very confident, if a little lack-luster at the end there. 

“So you are a nurse? I thought you might be but then I thought not.” Tony rolls his head to look around before returning to the man at his bedside. There’s a chair scooted out a bit behind the man. He must’ve been sitting right by Tony, waiting for him to wake up.

“What? No I’m not a– You don’t remember me?” The guy looks sad but also a little resigned, like he expected this, which makes Tony frown in turn.

“Noooo, you mean I know you?” Tony doesn’t mean it to come out as wondering as it does. He feels kind of floaty now that he thinks of it. He’s not too worried about that.

The guy grimaces at Tony’s words, and Tony realizes that they can be taken a way differently than he meant them so he keeps going. 

“I just meant, that I thought I would’ve remembered a face like yours?”

“A face like mine,” the guy repeats, a bit stonily.

“Yeeeahh you know, all pretty,” Tony says, and the guy loses his constipated face to look surprised and disbelieving. “What, I haven’t told you? I should’ve told you, you’re gorgeous! Are you sure you know me, I feel like that’s something I would’ve told you if I knew you!” 

“What, I don’t– of course you know me, Tony, I’m Steve.”

“Steve? Steeeve,” Tony squints studiously at apparently Steve, “That’s nice you look like a Steve.”

Steve laughs, chuckles really, and the sound is beautiful and fond and oh. Oh. No one laughs around Tony like that unless they really know him, and like him, and wow. Tony wants to make Steve laugh a lot more.

“You should laugh more,” he ends up saying, “Way more, like, all the time. Because wow!”

“Wow?” Steve raises an eyebrow, and he’s stopped laughing, which is the opposite of what Tony wanted, though his pretty cupid-bowed lips are quirked to the side.

“Yeah, very wow, very…” he trails off and gestures at Steve to convey the feelings Steve’s laugh gave him.

“Very pretty,” is what he settles on.

“Pretty?” Steve asks, and he’s moving back, away? No, just sitting back down on the chair, “This is the second time you’ve called me pretty, y'know, you must’ve got your head knocked harder than the doctors thought.”

Tony doesn’t register Steve’s words at first because, wow, was that Brooklyn he hears? He didn’t know Brooklyn could sound so attractive before. And then the meaning of Steve’s words reaches him and he sits up fast.

“Nononono, alleged head injury not withstanding, Steve, you are gorgeous. What, do I really never tell you that? How much of an asshole am I? I’ve got a pretty little thing like you sticking around me and waiting at my hospital bed like a soap opera special and I can’t even tell you how amazing you look?” Tony can’t believe it, he really can’t. He doesn’t make a habit of keeping his opinions to himself, not even if he knows nothing will come of it. “I need to make up for lost time, that is so not cool–”

“No, that’s not–”

“What, so I do tell you you’re pretty?” 

“Not exactly, I mean, not in those words– you think I’m pretty?” Steve has started blushing, a bright red across his ears and splotching across his face like stains. It’s really cute.

“Yeah, babe,” Tony says, and shifts over a bit to lean on his arm. His side stretches and though he can’t feel any pain, he feels like maybe he should. 

“Hey,” Steve says, getting up and pressing his shoulder back down onto the bed, “You’re hurt, don’t lean on your side like that.”

Tony lies back easily enough, and resigns himself to getting a crook in his neck, looking over at Steve, and finishes his sentence like Steve hadn’t interrupted. “I think you’re pretty.”

“What, like this?” Steve gestures down at himself, and his blush is fading but still there, and he’s still close after making sure Tony didn’t hurt himself. Tony can see his eyes, bright and clear and huge in his face. Framed with thick lashes, like a doll. His hair is floppy and blond and in a ridiculously old-fashioned style, his skin under that blush is creamy and pale and perfect, even the splashing of light freckles and the dark beauty marks on his cheek. He’s almost too thin, under that jacket and the shirt, but long-limbed for his height. 

“Definitely like this, do you not see yourself? Are you fishing for compliments here? You have to be, but that’s okay I’ll bite,” he grins brightly before continuing on, “I’m not the best with words but you make me wanna try. Seriously you’re as beautiful as the number pi–oh wow that rhymed, don’t expect a poem here I’m Tony Stark not E. E. Cummings– uh, right, like the golden ratio is written in your DNA, Leonard da Vinci would’ve died to examine your face– you know because he did the thing with dead bodies, wait is that creepy?”

Steve is laughing behind his hand, so it can’t be too creepy. He’s also turning just the loveliest shade of red and Tony couldn’t be more pleased. Wait, yes he can.

“Hey, babe, you know how I’m laid up here in the hospital with grievous wounds?”

“Yes?” Steve manages between chuckles.

“Well, how about you give me a kiss to make it better?” Tony tries his super suave, guaranteed and patented Knock ‘Em Dead smolder, but the way it makes Steve guffaw has him thinking the drugs mixed it up with Over The Top Lear Number Three, guaranteed as well, just in a different area (it always makes Steve laugh like that–)

Steve! 

“Steve!”

“Yeah?”

“No, I mean, you’re Steve, shit how hard did I get hit? That I forgot Captain America?”

“Well you had a little help there, Tony,” Steve says gesturing to all of himself, which was substantially less all than Tony was used to.

“C’mon Steve, it’s not your size that makes you Captain America. Look, look right there,” Tony points at Steve’s face.

“What?”

“That’s Cap all over,” Tony declares in response to Steve’s disgruntled but amused face. 

“He’s not wrong,” someone calls from the doorway, and yeah that’s Clint. “Is he done flirting with you yet, we come with cheap takeout,”

“Excuse me, I would never besmirch Captain America’s good name–”

“Can it Stark, you do this every time you get a knock to the head: oh my who is this that’s lights my sick room?” Clint mocks in a strangely high pitched voice.

“Are you taken? No? Now you are, no take-backs,” Natasha chimes in, carrying a plastic bag full of the best take out. So Tony will forgive her for making fun of him.

“I do not do that!”

“You were just doing that, Tony,” Natasha says as she sets the bag down at the foot of Tony’s hospital bed. Tony looks pleadingly at Steve who shrugs.

“You’ve got a habit.”

“Traitor!”

“Well, it worked the first time,” Steve says, standing up to rifle through the Styrofoam containers of food, picking out out the ones labeled for him a Tony.

“Then admit it, you find it charming!” Tony beams and reaches for his box.

“I find it charming,” Steve says, but withholds the box from Tony. At Tony’s pout he smiles and leans over to kiss him gently on the forehead before relinquishing the takeout.

“Groooosss, this is exactly what we were trying to avoid!” Clint’s voice comes from somewhere in the room.

Tony’s a bit distracted from smiling too much to actually pinpoint where.


End file.
